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Alison Gopnik is here.
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She teaches psychology and directs a cognitive development
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lab at the University of California at Berkeley.
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She has devoted much of her time to studying the minds of babies
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and young children.
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In a new book called "The Philosophical Baby" she says
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that they imagine, care, and experience more than we would
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have ever thought possible.
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"Slate" magazine says Gopnik's book is where you want to go if
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you want to get into the head of a baby.
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With that said, I'm pleased to have Alison Gopnik back at this
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table.
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Welcome.
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Thank you for having me.
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This is something else.
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"What children's minds tell us about truth, love, and the
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meaning of life." The "philosophical" in the title is
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interesting.
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Yes.
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Well, it's really supposed to mean two things.
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So one piece is that it turns out that looking at very young
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children can help answer some big, grand philosophical
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questions, like how can we find out the truth about the world
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or what's the origin of our moral sentiments?
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But it's also supposed to say that the babies themselves are
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solving and working on thinking about some of those big
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philosophical questions.
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How does the world work?
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What's going on in the minds of the other people around me?
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What's the nature of love?
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Those are all things that even babies and young children are
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trying to figure out.
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But those are the questions that babies are asking
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as well as adults?
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As well as adults, that's right.
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So they can tell the philosophers something, and
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they're kind of little philosophers themselves.
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Babies learn more, care more than we ever
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imagine.
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Right.
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Why do we have such little expectations of
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them?
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I think that's a really good question, and I
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think that what always happened is the people who knew babies
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the best, who looked at them the most, thought "there's more
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going on here than is appearing on the surface.
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Look at the way they're looking."
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But it was very hard to prove that scientifically.
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And for real knowledge, you want to have some scientific
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demonstration.
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And what's happened over the last 30 years is that we've
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learned scientifically how to ask babies and young children
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what they think in their language instead of our
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language.
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So what we've learned to do is look at what babies are looking
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at, what they reach for, how they smile, and look at that
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systematically and give them -- we've learned how to ask them
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questions by snowing them real objects, getting them to do
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things.
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And when do that it turns out we discover they know much more
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than we ever would have thought before.
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What's the most surprising thing you have
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learned about the cognitive behavior and getting inside a
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baby's mind?
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Well, I think one of the most impressive
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things just in the last ten years is that even very young
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babies understand something about statistics.
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So, you know, grownups are terrible at understanding
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probability.
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Anyone who's taken an introductory statistic class
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will tell you that.
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But it turns out that we can do experiments with even very young
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babies that show that they have some basic principles for
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learning probabilistically about the world.
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So an experiment that my colleague did, you can show a
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baby a box full of ping-pong balls, 80 percent red, 20
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percent white.
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And now the baby sees someone pick four white ping-pong balls
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and one red one out of this mostly red box.
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And the babies are surprised and look much longer at that
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event than a more likely event like picking four red and one
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white from an 80 percent red box.
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So then that means a really important principle of
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statistical inference about samples is something that we're
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seeing in even these teeny babies.
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And we've discovered that even young children and very small
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babies are using the same kinds of principles to learn about the
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world that the most sophisticated computer machine
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learning systems are using.
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Do you use your nephew and your niece Luke and
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Olivia as subjects?
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Well, I haven't used any of the children that
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I'm closest with as subjects.
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But I've learned a lot from looking at young children.
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And as you may know, my niece Olivia has a wonderful -- one of
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the things I write about is imaginary companions, because
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they're a great example of something we take for granted
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children have.
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And they that shows creativity?
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It shows what?
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Well, it shows the possibility of thinking
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about alternative ways that the world could be.
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So for years people like Freud and Piaget thought that
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children had imaginary companions because they were
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confused about the difference between fantasy and reality.
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And it turns out that's not true at all.
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Even young children know perfectly well "This is the real
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friend, this is the imaginary friend."
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But...
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So Olivia never thought that Charlie Ravioli was
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a real friend.
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No.
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But what the children seem to be doing was exploring what
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philosophers call counterfactuals.
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That's all the possibilities, all the different ways the
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world could be different are from the way it actually is.
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And one of the things we know that children are learning about
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the most is how other people work, right?
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That's the most important thing for a social species like ours.
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And they seem to invent imaginary friends as a way of
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exploring, how did the people around me, and especially how
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did the people in my particular culture work?
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So Olivia was my niece growing up in New York, had an imaginary
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friend, Charlie Ravioli, who was too busy to play with her.
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So she'd leave messages on his imaginary answering machine,
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"Charlie, could you get back to me?" [00:50:01:08-] And aside from being a
wonderful, funny, cute story, [-00:50:09:00] what that showed was that even
though she was only three, she'd
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already picked up some really important, basic, general causal
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principles about how people in New York work.
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And she could exercise her understanding of those
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principles to imagine possibilities, kind of like
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Einstein saying what would happen if the speed of light
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were different?
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So when you say that in terms of consciousness,
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the mind of kinds is like lantern.
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Right.
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And the mind of adults is like a spotlight?
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Right.
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What do you mean?
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Well, one of the big puzzling philosophical
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questions has always been what's consciousness like.
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And for us developmental psychologists...
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Unanswered by the way.
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Unanswered.
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Well, we don't have an answer to the big, big question which is
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how could a couple of pounds of gray goo have conscious
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experience?
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But we're starting to see a lot of links.
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Gray goo is what we're calling our brains?
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(LAUGHTER)
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That's right.
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But we're starting to see a lot of links between the kind of
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consciousness we have and what our gray goo is doing.
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And when we look at babies' brains, what we see is that
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they're actually more connected.
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There's more synaptic connections in babies' brains
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than adults.
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And when you look at adults -- when adults pay attention to
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something, a tiny portion of their brain relevant to what
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they're paying attention to gets to be particularly good at
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processing.
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It gets saturated with chemical transmitters that make it
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changeable.
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But the rest of our brain stays the same.
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And what happens to us in ou consciousness is we're very
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vividly conscious of one thing, the thing we pay attention to.
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But we damp down our consciousness of everything
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else.
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So we know something not about the great big question,
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but about how that particular vivid experience of attention
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when I'm focusing on something, I'm really conscious of it and
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everything else disappears.
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We know how that works in grown-ups.
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When we look at babies, what we see is that their attention is
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all over the place.
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They're really sort of paying attention to the whole world at
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once.
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And what they see is determined by what's the most captivating
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and interesting information branch.
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And then when we look at their brain we see that their brains
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are saturated in these chemicals that we adults just squirt on
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the tiny part of the brain we want to pay attention to.
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They have more neural pathways, too?
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They actually have more synapses early on.
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And what happens as we get older is that we prune out, we
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lose those synapses, the connections we don't use, and
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the connections we do use get to be stronger and stronger.
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And what happens to the ones we don't use?
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They just kind of disappear.
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So that may sound kind of scary and depressing, but actually, of
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course, one of the things that's really important for us as
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adults is not to pay attention to everything at once.
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In fact, when we say preschoolers don't pay
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attention, what we really mean is that they don't not pay
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attention.
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They can't just edit out the things that aren't important and
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just focus on the things that are.
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That's our great adult gift.
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Why do some adults have child like curiosity
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and others don't?
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Right.
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Well, I think that's a good question.
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I think all adults have the potential to continue to
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experience the world in some of the ways that children do.
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I think a nice example is like when we go to a foreign city.
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When we go to Beijing for the first time, and suddenly we're
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all like babies.
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We're in a world that's new and rich and everything around us is
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unexpected.
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You know, as opposed to our daily life when we're basically
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needing, lowing (ph) zombies most of the time.
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We go to the new place, we have to learn something new and
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suddenly we experience everything in a new way.
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What's the biggest mistake that adults make
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in terms of sort of being the right catalyst or not
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necessarily the best catalyst for their children?
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Well, I think...
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In terms of their brains?
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Right.
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I think right now we're in a strange situation, because for
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the first time there's a generation of caregivers,
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parents, who've never taken care of a baby before and haven't
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even watched other people take care of babies.
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And we know that the way that humans learn most things is we
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practice doing it when we're young and we watch other people
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who are experts and we learn how to do it.
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And that's how we learned how to be parents for most of history.
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And now we're in this very strange situation where we have
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parents who don't have that experience.
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And I think they tend to think that there's some magic book
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they can read or formula or technology or expert or toy that
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they could buy that would solve the problem.
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And so I think mostly what we need to say is they need to just
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kind of leave the children alone.
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The babies don't need to be my smarter.
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They're as smart as they could possibly be.
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And don't hover over them all the time.
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Give them a chance to be exploratory?
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What we've discovered is that when babies
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are just playing, and just playing with an attentive,
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loving adult, that's when all the fantastic cognitive work and
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learning is takes place.
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And I think it's a bit ironic because, having said that, we
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spend billions of dollars on all this stuff that doesn't
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work, like the special toys.
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But the thing that we know is important, which is loving,
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supportive caregivers, that we don't provide much support for
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in our culture.
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So if we really wanted the babies to be smart, what we
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would do is have parental leave and...
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So it's time?
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It's really time?
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And people.
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And I think if you think about it, in human history, even
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though in past ages we didn't have as many obvious resources,
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we did have the resource of having, say, a big extended
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family with lots of people paying attention to children,
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lots of people being invested in success of children.
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And that's really the -- that's really the secret.
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"The Philosophical Baby, What
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Children's Minds Tell us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of
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Life." Alison Gopnik, thank you for joining us.
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